Want to Learn React? Learn Haskell

8 Feb 2015

Take any tutorial out there. Spend a day learning, playing with Haskell. Or Clojure. Or OCaml. Or even F#. Any language that puts pure functional constructs
as first class citizens, really. If you never programmed with such a functional
language before, this will change your vision of programming. Not kidding. Try
it now.

Understand it deeply. Learn about things like tail call
elimination, function
purity and
immutability. Think about the
benefits and drawbacks of the functional approach. Is it robust? Is it
performant? Are your functions reasonable – easy to reason about? How does it
compare to the object-oriented programming?

When you come back to Javascript, you’ll find yourself missing the
expressivity, the composability of a functional language.

What makes Javascript’s React beautiful is
precisely that it makes components reasonable. Because they are autonomous
entities that do not depend on global state, you are in full control of their behavior. Coupled with immutable-js,
you’re ready to make interfaces robust, and components truly reusable.